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Chris Hayes Has Arrived With ‘Up’

Chris Hayes, 33, on the set of his MSNBC talk show, “Up w/Chris Hayes,” in New York.Credit
Robert Caplin for The New York Times

AROUND 11 p.m. on a Friday this past spring, Ted Leo, a singer and songwriter considered something of a legend in New York punk and indie-rock, opened a raucous late set at the Black Cat club in Washington with a curious greeting to his followers.

“I know how hard it is to be here,” he joked to a crowd of about 750, a Gibson hollow-body drooping from his shoulder, “because you all have to be up at 8 a.m. tomorrow to watch ‘Up With Chris Hayes.’ ”

Mr. Hayes, the host of MSNBC’s new morning weekend political talk show, was padding around his apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, early the next day when e-mails started popping up from excited friends who had been at the concert. He was getting used to surging ratings and frequent mentions on The Huffington Post. But a shout-out from Ted Leo?

He had arrived.

“It meant the show is known,” said Mr. Hayes, 33, who says he has never met the singer. “He was confident enough to make the joke and think he’d get a laugh.”

Word of “Up w/Chris Hayes” has spread beyond a few hundred punk fans. In less than a year on television (and with a chirpy voice, a weakness for gesticulation and a tendency to drop honors-thesis words like “signifier” into casual conversation), Mr. Hayes has established himself as Generation Y’s wonk prince of the morning political talk-show circuit.

But even with his grad-student sensibility and a program that resembles a dorm-room bull session, Mr. Hayes has attracted a cult following, particularly among frustrated hyper-educated members of the Occupy Wall Street generation who are seemingly fed up with the partisan bickering that prevails in Washington and passes as political discourse on the airwaves.

“He is never doctrinaire,” Mr. Leo said in an interview. Both punk fans and “Up” fans are “suspicious of any authority,” he said, and appreciate that Mr. Hayes “is always willing to challenge his own assumptions, and the received wisdom on both sides of the aisle.”

Like Deadheads or Trekkies, fans of the program cluster under a common nickname: Uppers.

Credit for the nickname goes to Wyeth Ruthven, a public relations consultant in Washington, who coined the #uppers Twitter hashtag as a joke about the program’s early broadcast time last October, a couple of weeks after it began. The term quickly went viral after Mr. Hayes (who monitors his Twitter feed on a MacBook Pro beside him as cameras roll, and often invokes viewer tweets on air) retweeted Mr. Ruthven. Within weeks, hundreds were joining the spirited #uppers debates on issues like gay marriage and industrial farming. Viewers now post more than 6,000 comments every weekend.

Social media, in fact, have played an unusually important role in driving traffic to the program, an MSNBC spokeswoman said. About 45 percent of the visitors to the program’s Web site, which contains complete episodes, linked through sites like Facebook and Twitter. In April, those users spent an average of 51 minutes on the site each visit.

But Twitter is still the hotbed of “Up” fandom. Even so, the program’s feed is not just an online clubhouse for New York media types like Lizz Winstead, a creator of “The Daily Show,” and members of Le Tigre, the too-cool electro-pop band. Cher and Chad Ochocinco have chimed in, too.

Whatever their political leanings, fans are responding out of frustration with the status quo, said Jim Rosenberg, a recruiting consultant in Greensboro, N.C., and frequent tweeter. “It’s the pent-up demand for voices other than the well-rehearsed and seasoned insider professionals who have dominated television delivering practiced meaninglessness for years,” he said.

“Up” comes off as a rebuke to traditional cable shout-fests like CNN’s late “Crossfire.” Thanks to its early weekend time slot, the program has the freedom to unwind over two hours each Saturday and Sunday. Guests are encouraged to go deep into the issues of the week, and not try to score cheap-shot points to win the debate.

It is a point that Mr. Hayes hammered home at 7:15 a.m. on a recent Saturday, when he strode into the green room off Studio 3A at 30 Rockefeller Center to fill in two guests, both college professors, on the ground rules.

Photo

Chris Hayes in his Rockefeller Center office. He has been successful drawing viewers ages 18 to 34.Credit
Robert Caplin for The New York Times

“The first and foremost important rule of the show: we’re not on television — no talking points, no sound bites,” he said, his hair still a bed-head tangle and his suit collar askew. “We have a lot of time for actual conversation. So actually listen, actually respond.”

An hour later, as the cameras rolled, Mr. Hayes and his guests waded thigh-deep into an analysis of private equity and whether it is bad for the economy. At a table of wonks, Mr. Hayes, who studied the philosophy of mathematics at Brown, came off as the wonkiest as he deconstructed the budgetary implications of tax arbitrage. Opinions were varied and passionate, but there was no sniping, no partisan grandstanding.

“I like the fact that it’s dialogic, small-d ‘democratic,’ ” Mr. Hayes said of his show. “We’re all sitting at the same table, we’re creating the public sphere in miniature. I was going to say, ‘We’re going to model Habermasian communicative action,’ but that’s excessively pretentious.”

While MSNBC’s overall ratings dipped in May along with those of other news channels, Mr. Hayes’s program was one of the few to surge, rising about 15 percent in total viewers over MSNBC’s programming in the time slot from the previous year. Since Dec. 26, it has been No. 1 on average in its Sunday time slot on cable news channels among viewers ages 18 to 34, according to Nielsen figures provided by the network. Despite much of the country being in bed when it is on, “Up” has occasionally flirted with the ratings of prime-time programs like “The Rachel Maddow Show” (hosted by Mr. Hayes’s mentor) among those 18-to-34 viewers.

Ms. Maddow said on her program that “Up” was “the best news show on TV, including this one.”

“Chris is the antidote to the anti-intellectual posing that has characterized the last decade in cable news,” she wrote in an e-mail. She added: “No one else in cable is even trying long-form, off-the-news-cycle dives like him — let alone succeeding at them as he is. He’s giving the network Sunday shows a run for their money.”

“It is genuinely shocking to me that I’m on a television show,” Mr. Hayes, a Bronx-reared son of a civil servant and educator, said from his office on the eighth floor of 30 Rock on a recent Tuesday. As a student at Hunter College High School in Manhattan, he aspired to write. “My dream when I was 14,” he said, “was someday I could have a David Levine caricature of me in The New York Review of Books.”

A life of reflection in the ivory tower now seems a long way off. In the last year, he started his first TV talk show, had his first child (a daughter, Ryan, by his wife, Kate Shaw, a law professor) and published his first book (“Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy,” released June 12).

His professional life has been a sprint since he vaulted from a staff job at In These Times, a socialist-leaning newspaper in Chicago, to The Nation, where was named Washington bureau chief at 28. From that perch, he became a regular guest on Ms. Maddow’s program and eventually started substituting for her as a guest host. Phil Griffin, the MSNBC president, offered him his own program in the spring of 2011.

So far, their decision to go live and deep without a teleprompter every weekend has paid dividends, but it also carries risks.

Over Memorial Day weekend, for example, Mr. Hayes took his first banana-cream pie in the food fight that is contemporary American political discourse. Dissecting the political rhetoric used in regard to American veterans, he explained that he was “uncomfortable” with the word “hero” as it is tossed around by politicians. “It seems to me it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war,” he said.

FoxNews.com assailed him for “stupidity.” The commander in chief of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Richard DeNoyer, called the remarks “reprehensible and disgusting.”

Mr. Hayes issued a lengthy apology before the next week’s program (“I fell short in a crucial moment”). But in the broadcast that followed, nothing changed.

“I talk off-script for four hours a week, about very sensitive, complex matters,” he said two weeks later. “That comes with the territory.”

A version of this article appears in print on June 24, 2012, on page ST1 of the New York edition with the headline: Speak Up, But Don’t Shout. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe